/corda

Corda is a distributed ledger platform designed to record, manage and automate legal agreements between business partners. Designed by (and for) the world's largest financial institutions, it offers a unique response to the privacy and scalability challenges facing decentralised applications.

Primary LanguageKotlinOtherNOASSERTION

Corda

Corda

Corda is a decentralised database system in which nodes trust each other as little as possible.

Features

  • A P2P network of nodes
  • Smart contracts
  • Flow framework
  • "Notary" infrastructure to validate uniqueness of transactions
  • Written as a platform for distributed apps called CorDapps
  • Written in Kotlin, targeting the JVM

Read our full and planned feature list here.

Getting started

Firstly, read the Getting started documentation.

Next, use the following guides to set up your dev environment:

  • If you are on Windows use this getting started guide which also explains through how to run the sample apps.

  • Alternatively if you are on Mac/Linux, watch this brief Webinar which walks through getting Corda, installing it, building it, running nodes and opening projects in IntelliJ.

After the above, watching the following webinars will give you a great introduction to Corda:

Webinar 1 – Introduction to Corda

Richard Brown, R3 Chief Technology Officer, explains Corda's unique architecture, the only distributed ledger platform designed by and for the financial industry's unique requirements. You may want to read the Corda non-technical whitepaper as pre-reading for this session.

Roger Willis, R3 Developer Relations Lead, provides an overview of Corda from a developer’s perspective and guidance on how to start building CorDapps. You may want to view Webinar 1 - Introduction to Corda as preparation for this session. NB. This was recorded for the M5 release.

Building on Corda

To build your own CorDapps:

  1. Clone the CorDapp Template repository
  2. Read the README (IMPORTANT!)
  3. Read the Writing a CorDapp documentation

To look at the Corda source and run some sample applications:

  1. Clone this repository
  2. To run some sample CorDapps, read the running the demos documentation
  3. Start hacking and contribute!

Useful links

Development State

Corda is currently in very early development and should not be used in production systems. Breaking changes will happen on minor versions until 1.0. Experimentation with Corda is recommended.

Pull requests, experiments, and contributions are encouraged and welcomed.

Background

The project is supported by R3, a financial industry consortium, which is why it contains some code for financial use cases and why the documentation focuses on finance. The goal is to use it to construct a global ledger, simplifying finance and reducing the overheads of banking. But it is run as an open source project and the basic technology of a peer-to-peer decentralised database may be useful for many different projects.

Contributing

Please read here.

License

Apache 2.0

Acknowledgements

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